


Once We Were Free (And We Will Be Again)

by wolfbird



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Jewish Comic Day, Steve is appalled that people think he's Hydra, Steve takes a long and very angry walk down memory lane, jewish!bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 18:33:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7065394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfbird/pseuds/wolfbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers, despite everything, is still just a kid from Brooklyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once We Were Free (And We Will Be Again)

**Author's Note:**

> In which Nick Spencer works for the New York Times, and is probably (hopefully) on the verge of being fired.

It was a calm, clear morning; great glass windows showed the sun shining on the valley T’Challa’s palace overlooked. Inside the great glass windows sat Steve Rogers, and inside Steve Rogers sat a calm and a clear that almost matched the weather outside. The hospitality of T’Challa, the Dora Milaje and the rest of the Wakandans was more that Steve could have ever hoped for, though he supposed he should have expected it, given T’Challa’s courtesy and professionalism after the battle. Steve was immensely grateful, and even more grateful that he had something in the present to be grateful for. Sometimes it felt like he’d left everything he had to be grateful for behind, tucked away in the alleys and cobblestone crevices of a noisy, lively neighborhood in Brooklyn New York, where kids played baseball in the street, using foodseller’s carts as bases, and you were as likely to meet someone who spoke Yiddish or Italian as you were to meet someone who spoke English. 

13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn: a cultural hub, definitely, and sometimes a haphazard cultural mishmash, too, where the Irish scrapped with the Italians for storefronts, and a Catholic Church shared a wall with that beautiful synagogue that always left Steve in awe. When Steve was a kid, all of the chaos and culture of the place seemed to have an order than only he and Bucky understood, an order that they could navigate with the ease of the young and invincible.

Thinking of Bucky made Steve’s calm and clear shake, just a little. He took a deep breath to remind himself: Bucky was safe. Frozen, sure, but safe. Steve had full confidence that the medical and technological prowess of the Wakandans would be utilized to its fullest extent to help Bucky, and that was what mattered. They were safe, and if they were separated, it would be for a relatively short time. Steve could wait. He’d had plenty of practice with that.

“Hey grandpa,” came Sam’s voice from behind Steve’s left shoulder. “You gonna come join us for some raisin bran and prunes?”

“Old man jokes? Really? Still?” Steve replied, unable to hide a smile.

Sam laughed. “Well, someone has to take Natasha’s place as the exhibit curator.”

Natasha. Still in Avenger’s Tower, still bound by the Sokovia accords. Steve wished she could be in Wakanda with them, but he understood the political upheaval that might cause. She was already facing enough flak back in the US. It was better for her to be over there, smoothing things over as she did so well. Still, he missed her, and he knew Sam and Clint did, too.

“But seriously. Breakfast. You coming?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, sounds great,” Steve replied, raising himself from his chair like a great cat waking from a nap. Sam ruffled his hair affectionately as they made their way to the round table where Clint and Scott sat, Clint nursing a mug of coffee and Scott pouring over his laptop while absently munching on a piece of bread heaped with fresh fruit. Sam and Steve helped themselves to the fruit as well, and Sam poured himself a cup of coffee from the kettle on the table.

“They’re being so nice to us,” Scott marveled through a mouthful of toast. “This place is fantastic!”

“It really is amazing,” Steve agreed, turning a guava over in his hands. “Talking to T’Challa yesterday… I thought waking up to American tech was a shock, but the Wakandans are miles ahead.” He shook his head with a smile. “Tony and Rhodey would love it here. Bruce, too.”

At Steve’s mention of the other Avengers, the table fell silent. Sure, “Team Cap”, as American media had dubbed their band of outcasts, worked fine on its own, but none of them could forget that each and every one of them had friends on “the other side”, and homes they weren’t able to go back to.

“Makes you wonder why America’s so fucked if all this technology exists,” Clint muttered around the lip of his mug, breaking the mood.

Sam smiled ruefully. “You know why, man.” 

“Racism. Right.” Clint shook his head and filled his mug to the brim again. “White people continue to disappoint me.”

“Dude, you’re a white people.”

“And I continue to disappoint myself, exactly.”

Sam smirked, about to respond, when Scott cut him off. “Guys, guys, T’Challa’s about to speak in Geneva! It’s livestreaming right now.” He turned up the volume on his laptop and the other three gathered behind him. As Clint reached over Scott’s shoulder to turn on subtitles, Sam took the opportunity to shoot Steve a questioning look. 

Steve grimaced slightly; T’Challa had made it clear it would be in Wakanda’s best interests for him to make both a public statement to the press and a slightly less public negotiation with the United Nations Security Council regarding his agreement to harbor Bucky and provide asylum for Steve and the rest. Although T’Challa presented his decision to fly into Geneva as a discussion in which Steve was taking part, it was clear that Steve himself had little say in the matter of T’Challa’s departure. Steve trusted T’Challa to speak well, and he trusted the technological superiority of Wakanda to make the members of the Security Council shy to challenge T’Challa’s decision. Still, he wouldn’t have been surprised if other members of the team disagreed, which is why he hadn’t discussed T’Challa’s decision with them. 

Well, now they knew, and Steve would have to deal with the fallout later. If Bucky was there, Steve knew, he would have laughed and reminded Steve that jumping in solo was always how Steve had done things. _With you following right behind, buddy,_ Steve thought. _But not anymore._

Steve’s attention turned back to Scott’s screen. For a second, the sounds of a large number of people chattering urgently crackled through the laptop speakers, but noise of the crowd – largely press, it seemed - resolved as T’Challa raised a hand. In a striking black suit, against the backdrop of the Roman columns of the United Nations Office in Geneva, T’Challa looked especially regal, enough to intimidate even those who made a living heckling fall silent. 

“Let me get straight to the point, if I may,” he began. “I am here today to defend my decision to shelter both James Buchanan Barnes, the man known before as the Winter Soldier, and the team of superheroes led by Steve Rogers, the man known before as Captain America. I am not here to negotiate turning any of them over to either to the custody of either United Nations or the United States of America, entities which seem, at times, threateningly close to aligning in goals and even, dare I say it, in practices.”

This earned a buzz from the crowd, and multiple reporters’ voices rose over the clamor, but T’Challa’s eyes flashed and he held up his hand once more to quiet them. They were slower in reacting the second time.

“ _However,_ ” he continued. “I am also not here to defend Rogers’ decision to reject the Sokovia Accords. It will be his prerogative to do so in the days and weeks that follow. I will say that, as the leader of a country that has numerous times been pressured to sign agreements which we were not privy to creating, perhaps his reluctance to put his name to a document he was not even allowed time to read is less of a revolutionary act than a prudent one.”

From someone in the crowd, behind the large clump of reporters, came several distant voices shouting angrily in Russian. The camera panned out to show a line of protestors holding the Sokovian flag and a banner in Cyrillic and English covered in only one word: Justice. Steve’s stomach twisted with guilt. These people had lost their homes and families…and they sincerely believed the Accords were the answer. 

“Wakanda has agreed to be part of the United Nations only because we believe that an international forum for communication is integral to the development of a world system that values peace over conflict. We are willing to compromise on many issues, but there is one issue on which we will never bend: our belief in justice, not only in name but also in practice. It is easy to demonize, to make one man, or one group, the face of all that we hate. I know this; when my father died…” 

Here he paused; it was clear that this was still difficult for him to speak about. “…When my father _was killed_ , I had no wish other than to bring his killer down. That wish drove me to actions that I am not proud of now. Tomorrow, perhaps some of _you_ will not be proud of what you have said and done in the name of revenge. Hatred, especially in response to an injustice, is a powerful emotion. But hatred that stems from injustice, paradoxical as it may seem, is not always hatred that is _justified_.”

He paused again, for effect this time. The crowd stayed silent, breath bated.

“There is much hatred for Steve Rogers and his accomplices at this moment. I am choosing to shelter them because only time, and due process, will tell us whether that hatred is justified. If Rogers were to be brought before the United Nations now, the desire for personal and political gain would trump reason and fairness. It is my duty as a Wakandan, and my duty as a _world citizen_ , to make sure that personal and political gain never stand in the way of justice.”

“He’s good,” Sam said admiringly. 

“Press questions are still going to be a shitshow,” Scott said. “Better keep watching.”

Sure enough, reporters were almost literally clambering over one another to get in their questions. Many of them were American, identifiable immediately by their accents. There were a lot of questions asking T’Challa if he believed that Steve and his crew were traitors to their country, to which T’Challa responded that it was not his job to decide. Some more shrewd reporters implied that this was a stunt designed to distract from the fact that Wakanda had declined to sign any recent international trade agreements, a political move that had had the UN boiling for a while now. Questioning ranged from the obscene to the serious, and even T’Challa was beginning to look overwhelmed. After a while, he raised his hands again, and said “I will take one more, please.”

“Excuse me,” an American journalist piped up. “I’m Nick Spencer, writer for the New York Times.”

“Go on,” T’Challa replied, only barely masking his annoyance.

“Yeah, so, how can you, as a black African, reconcile harboring an alleged white supremacist and member of the arm of the Nazi party known as Hydra?”

“As I said in response to an earlier question,” T’Challa began, evidently irked at repeating himself, “James Buchanan Barnes has been medically proven to have been subject to a brainwashing technique that utilized mind-altering substances to suspend his agency -”

“I’m not talking about Barnes,” the journalist interrupted. “I’m talking about Steven Rogers, the man formerly known as Captain America.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr is legend-of-laurel.
> 
> Steve's background in this fic differs a little from MCU canon. The quickest summary I can give is that Steve grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, which from what Wikipedia has told me used to be a multicultural neighborhood populated largely with Jewish immigrants (like Bucky's mom's family!), but with some Irish immigrants (like Sarah Rogers!). Historical inaccuracies may abound in later chapters; I will try to keep them under control. I have no idea what Borough Park or 13th Street was actually like; presumably MCU history is different from actual history (just as MCU politics are different from actual politics), so I feel somewhat comfortable taking liberties.


End file.
